Plug and play is a perspective on the way that social theory should be accumulated and used, namely that it is an assembly of interacting pieces that can co-exist rather some grand unifying theory. It was described by [[Étienne Wenger]] [@wenger-traynerPracticeTheoryConfessions2013|(2013)] The argument follows from that social theory is a perspective of the world, rather than a proposition that is either true or false. It can give you tools to think about the familiar in new ways eg. [[Communities of practice|communities of practice]] and [[Situated learning|situated learning]]. Hence, social theory competes in the usefulness that its perspective provides in some given context, however, this makes it difficult to accumulate and build on theory like we see in the natural sciences that investigates the physical world. But rather than aspiring to be like the positivist domains, we can run the theories through each other in a 'plug and play' manner. [[Pierre Dillenbourg]] makes use of this idea within the [[Educational modelling language|modelling language]] of [[Orchestration graphs|orchestration graphs]], where multiple learning science theories could be plugged into a lesson plan, rather than subscribing to a singular viewpoint eg. 'I am a social constructivist'. # References Wenger-Trayner, E. (2013). The practice of theory: Confessions of a social learning theorist. In _Reframing educational research_ (pp. 105–118). Routledge. [https://api.taylorfrancis.com/content/chapters/edit/download?identifierName=doi&identifierValue=10.4324/9780203590737-12&type=chapterpdf](https://api.taylorfrancis.com/content/chapters/edit/download?identifierName=doi&identifierValue=10.4324/9780203590737-12&type=chapterpdf) --- TODO * give examples * talk about the idea of technical terms ... it is an interesting point that I haven't considered, that in the interoperation of theories we need to pay more attention to minimise the unnecessary production of technical terms. since in social theory you are not simply using the objective results, but sharing perspectives that need to be deeply understood for analysis * think about how it relates to the more positivist theories of learning like spaced repetition